Fifty years ago this week, the world was introduced to Rocket “Rocky” J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose. An animated television series called Rocky and His Friends debuted on ABC at 5:30 pm on November 19, 1959. In 1961, the show moved to NBC, where it was renamed The Bullwinkle Show and ran until 1964. IGN calls The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show—the collective name for the two series—the 11th best animated series ever, but in my mind it’s second only to The Simpsons (the first 8 seasons anyway).  To celebrate the moose and squirrel’s half-century of existence, here are 11  things you should know about the show and characters.

1. The show was created by producer Jay Ward and cartoonist Alex Anderson, who had worked together on the Crusader Rabbit series. Their initial vision was a show called The Frostbite Falls Revue about a group of animals running a TV station, but the project never got beyond the proposal stage. The next attempt at a new series began with the pilot Rocky the Flying Squirrel. General Mills came on as a sponsor and Rocky and His Friends was born.

2. Instead of hiring animators when production of Rocky and His Friends got rolling, Ward convinced some friends at Dancer, Fitzgerald, & Sample, an advertising agency that had General Mills as a client, to buy the Mexican animation studio Gamma Productions so he could outsource the animation. The plan saved money and the Mexican studio churned work out quickly, but quality was an issue. In early episodes of the show, it’s not uncommon to see characters’ facial hair, costumes and skin tone change color.

3. Bullwinkle is named after Jay Ward’s friend Clarence Bullwinkel, a Berkeley landlord and owner of an Oakland Chevrolet dealership.

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Every Friday, I post a series of unrelated questions meant to spark conversation in the comments. Answer one, answer all, respond to someone else’s reply, whatever you want. Very casual. On to this week’s topics of discussion…

1. Earlier this decade, I had an interview with a big PR firm. The first person I met with asked me where I got my news—I think her exact question was, “What newspapers do you subscribe to?” I told her I read the New York Times and New York Post online. This immediately put me on her “no” list. “You can’t trust what you read online,” she told me. I stressed again that I was reading the same articles she was reading in the printed paper, but she wasn’t buying it. “People can fake those web addresses, you know,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re reading.” What’s the most irrational thing you’ve ever encountered in a job interview?

2. A couple years ago, David Israel asked you to share your favorite punny store names. (His entry: “The Merchant of Tennis.”) I think it’s time to ask again: what great/terrible punny store names have you seen or been to?

3. A couple months ago, for several long days, I had the Perfect Strangers theme song stuck in my head. Usually when that happens, if I listen to the offending song in its entirety, it goes away. But not that time. You know how I got it out of my head? I had to sing along. If someone had hidden a camera in my office, they’d have a YouTube sensation on their hands. The weird thing was, I haven’t seen an episode of Perfect Strangers in many years. What’s the strangest song you couldn’t get out of your head?
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Last week, after asking you to dream up a new theme restaurant chain, I offered a free mental_floss t-shirt to the most creative budding restaurateur. We have a tie. (more…)

There are obscure holidays, and then there are really obscure holidays. I used to think Canadian Boxing Day and Three Kings’ Day were weird; in reality, there are so many holidays stuffed into our calendar that you could spend the whole year observing them and still miss a few. Here are a few of my favorite upcoming weird holidays.

December 5: Bathtub Party Day
The online herbalists at wellcat.com copyrighted this holiday in order, I have to assume, to inspire people to buy essential oils and fancy salts to add to their bathwater. I’m not sure what their definition of “party” is, but the way I see it, there’s a 50% chance that Bathtub Party Day is the only holiday on our calendar which advocates having multiple, simultaneous sex partners. (Speaking of bathtubs, December 5 is also repeal day, which celebrates the end of Prohibition and the need to create bathtub gin.) (more…)

The mental_floss store has terrific holiday gifts for everyone from Grandpa to your Secret Santa pick. Through Monday, we’re offering FREE SHIPPING on all U.S. & Canadian orders! So go on, knock out your shopping in one visit, and kick back.

Just enter the coupon code EARLYBIRD before checkout. Offer valid through Monday, November 23rd.

When Lafayette Ronald Hubbard founded Scientology in 1952, he had no idea there would one day be something called Techno music (best done in Germany, of course) let alone a quiz devoted to comparing and contrasting them. Turns out, the two have a lot in common. See if you can tell which word belongs to which camp.

Take the Scientology Term or German Techno Artist quiz now.

Funnyman Eddie Murphy has been on the national stage for nearly 30 years now, so it’s understandable that audiences think they know the comedian and actor inside and out. Here are five things you might not know about the man who brought Axel Foley to life:

1. He Knew What He Wanted to Be When He Grew Up

Murphy’s high school yearbook photo featured the caption, “Future plans: Comedian,” and the young Murphy got down to business pretty quickly. He started working Long Island clubs like the Comic Strip, and his act proved to be so popular that within two years he was a full cast member on Saturday Night Live. It was a pretty quick start for someone who was such a lethargic student that he had to repeat the 10th grade.

Murphy was a natural for SNL, where his impersonations included Buckwheat, Bill Cosby, Muhammad Ali, and Jerry Lewis. Murphy wasn’t as at home off-screen, though, where he had trouble using his paychecks responsibly. As he later put it, “Give any 19-year-old kid $1,000 a week and he’ll freak out.” In 1982 Murphy told People that he had blown his previous year’s earnings on a Trans-Am and gifts for friends.

2. He May Not Have Written Coming to America

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Lost Man Drives 400 Miles to Get Newspaper

Eighty-one-year-old Eric Steward of Yass, New South Wales, Australia went out to get a morning paper on Wednesday. He took a wrong turn onto a highway and drove for nine hours before stopping to ask for directions! Steward ended up in Geelong, Victoria, 400 miles from home. A policeman called Steward’s wife, and sent him in the right direction for home.

“I just went out on the road to have a drive, a nice peaceful drive,” he told reporters, adding he did not need a satellite navigation device as he’d only been lost once.

The Hamster Hotel

The Hamster Hotel is now open in Nantes, France. No, it’s not just a clever name. Frederic Tabary and Yann Falquerho converted a room in an old building to a human-sized hamster cage complete with a running wheel and hay to sleep on. Guests will live like a hamster, to the point of even having grain offered for meals. The price for the room is currently 99 euros for a night, but the price will go up when Wifi and a TV screen are installed.

Dad Spoke Only Klingon to Child for Three Years

Minnesota linguist d’Armond Speers has a doctorate in computational linguistics. He says he isn’t much of a Star Trek fan. But he spent the first three years of his son’s life speaking to him only in the Klingon language!

“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers said. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”

Speers helped develop a digital dictionary in Klingon for Mac, Windows, and iPhone for the software company Ultralingua. Speer’s son is now 15 years old and doesn’t speak a word of Klingon.

Trimming a Hedge with a Crane

Two men in Cambridge, in the Waikato region of New Zealand have a different idea of how to trim an unruly hedge. They were spotted mowing the hedge with a riding lawnmower hoisted above the foliage by a crane! The two men, who wished to remain unnamed, joked that they might go into business with their unusual trimming method. After a scheduled hedge-trimming service didn’t show up, they came up with the stunt in order to make a video and hoped it would be popular on the internet. The friends managed to get a crane and a lawnmower, but had no video camera. The mower operator broke a hand during the stunt in a fall from the crane. However, passers-found the sight quite entertaining.

North Pole Mail Program Dropped

The 2,100 citizens of North Pole, Alaska take Christmas very seriously. Since 1954, they’ve volunteered for Operation Santa, a program of the US Postal Service which answers letters to Santa Claus. The program has volunteers all over the country, and many letters are routed through Alaska to get the special North Pole postmark. However, the USPS is discontinuing the practice of sending letters to the town of North Pole. New security restrictions on letter-writer’s identities are not feasible in the small Alaskan town. Children can still write letters to Santa Claus and get an answer, but they won’t go to North Pole.

Lion Opens Car Door with Teeth

Lion Safari Park in Johannesburg, South Africa allows cars to drive through the lion enclosure so people can see the animals up close. A family in a white Toyota drove through with the doors closed, but apparently failed to lock at least one back door. A 300-pound lion deftly reached over and opened the back door with his teeth. The family remained still for several seconds, supposedly in shock, before driving off as quickly as possible. The lion chased the car to a gate, where a park attendant held it back by throwing stones. Richard Holden was in a car behind the Toyota took pictures of the incident.

Students Arrested for Not Paying Tip

College students Leslie Pope and John Wagner and four of their friends went to the Lehigh Pub in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The bill came to $73, which Pope and Wagner paid, but they refused to pay the mandatory $16.35 tip, because they said the service was lousy. So they were arrested.

The pub, which was very busy that night, took the $73, but then called the cops, who treated the matter as a theft.

The menu clearly states, “18 percent gratuity added to check of parties of 6 of more,” and a similar message is printed on receipts, a pub employee said this morning.

The students will be in court over the matter next month.

Here’s the second entry in our Brain Game number block puzzle series. Enjoy!

Each of the nine squares inside the main red grid should contain either a 1, 2, or 3. Three of these numbers are already provided for you. Place a 1, 2, or 3 in each of the blank squares so that the sum of the rows, columns, and diagonals equal the totals shown at the ends of those lines (after the equals signs). Good luck:

NOTE: Super-sharp reader Mike was the first to find a second solution to this puzzle, so we’ve added it to the list. Nice job, Mike!

I’ve written a lot about strange places in the U.S. this year — an airplane graveyard in the desert; a mock Iraqi village in the suburbs of San Diego; a town killed by a modern-day dustbowl two hours north of Los Angeles. But the strangest place I’ve ever been — the strangest and most beautiful, I should say — is a developing nation 1000km northeast of Australia, populated by the friendliest former cannibals you’ll ever meet, called Vanuatu. I wrote about it a little bit back in April, right after I returned from two weeks in country, but I’d had such a whirlwind trip, and taken thousands of pictures I’d hardly even begun to cull, that I needed six months or so to process just how profoundly different life in Vanuatu is.

It’s an archipelago comprised of 84 volcanic islands, each separated by many miles of shark-filled seas and unpredictable weather. Travel between islands is difficult and expensive, and as a result, to many of Vanuatu’s 200,000 citizens “international travel” means going to a nearby island every few years to visit cousins. They’ve had some exposure to foreigners — missionaries starting in the 19th century (some of whom were eaten); American soldiers during World War II, who established a base on the largest island to fend off the Japanese, stationed in the nearby Solomons; some British and French, who co-governed Vanuatu in a bizarre arrangement for many years; and tourists that come to a few of the islands nowadays (mostly from Australia, which is where they all assumed I was from). But even on the largest islands, which are mountainous and covered with tough-to-penetrate jungle, there are remote villages where locals have rarely, if ever, encountered outsiders. I didn’t make it quite that far afield, but I did find myself in a few off-the-beaten villages that were definitely not on the tourist trail, and luckily, I brought my camera.

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NASA needs lots of help sorting through the hundreds of thousands of images they’ve collected from the surface of Mars. To enlist volunteer participation, they developed the online game Be A Martian, in which players analyze data and collect points. (via Metafilter)
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Will turkeys respond to beatboxing any sooner than plain turkey calls? Well, you also have to factor in the giggling.
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Foreign Afflictions: Mental Disorders across Country Borders. Are mental illnesses in other cultures really different, or are the underlying processes the same with different manifestations?
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Children re-enact the First Thanksgiving. And and then go on to illustrate a big chunk of American history.
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Watch Stefanie Germanotta perform at an NYU Talent Show. She would later make a name for herself as Lady Gaga.
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It’s the Mother Nature we rarely get to see. Feast your eyes on the winners of the Olympus BioScapes 2009 digital imaging competition. (via Neatorama)
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Five Other Thanksgiving Holidays. As much as we appreciate the Pilgrims’ contribution to our holiday calendar, they are far from the first to set aside a holiday to give thanks for a bountiful harvest.